Gentrification

Gentrification is a hot topic in the city, and it has come to affect my world.

First, my brother has said that since he knows that housing is out of reach, he's looking for jobs out of state. It hurts me to hear it, but, I understand his reasoning. When he moves, my mom, if she wants to say in LA, will have to find subsidized housing so she can live on her retirement income. There is a three year waiting list for subsidized retirement housing in LA County.

Second, the best gay club in Orange County, the Boom Boom Room, is being forced to shut down. The new owners of the building, who paid $11M for the Boom and the hotel next door, can't gain back their investment on the lease money from the Boom. They're going to have to put in something more swanky. The Boom is a victim of the changing demographics of Laguna Beach. It used to be a town for artists and gays, but, now it is mostly a town for the rich.

Third, my neighbor across the street, a pony-tailed Mexican divorcee named Jesus, has just sold his house to (what appears to be) a white lesbian couple. I'm not sure how I feel about there being white people across the street. I've only just gotton used to the idea of their being other white people in my neighborhood, when I used to be the token white man in South Central. Now there are white people across the street! There goes the neighborhood.

Lastly, there is the movie Quinceanera, which documents the much more severe cultural changes going on in Echo Park neighborhood of LA. The movie is pretty good. I caught it at the Arclight on Friday.

I really tried to buy in Echo Park two years ago, but at the time the $400k asking prices were too much of a stretch. DQNews now puts the median price of a home in the 90026 at $606k. Phew.

I can't feel too badly about the cultural shifts occurring in my neighborhood, since most people are homeowners. The old residents are cashing out and buying new houses out of state or in the IE. White people are replacing them because they themselves are priced out of the beach cities, the Valley, and Pasadena. Where it becomes a tragedy is for the renters. Rents track home prices, and so the working class suffers without the option to cash out.

Plus, my old neighborhood, Midway City, which used to be a white working class neighborhood, is now a middle class Vietnamese neighborhood. Working-class white homeowners have been pushed out of Orange County alltogether, and now only exist in towns like desert towns like Lancaster and Highland.